Links for 2018-10-03

At the beginning of the year I spent several months deep diving on Kubernetes for a project at work. As an all-inclusive, batteries-included technology for infrastructure management, Kubernetes solves many of the problems you’re bound to run into at scale. However popular wisdom would suggest that Kubernetes is an overly complex piece of technology only really suitable for very large clusters of machines; that it carries a large operational burden and that therefore using it for anything less than dozens of machines is overkill. I think that’s probably wrong. Kubernetes makes sense for small projects and you can have your own Kubernetes cluster today for as little as $5 a month.

Poor design of Tesco Bank debit cards played a significant role in creating security vulnerabilities that led to thousands of customers having their accounts emptied. One of these involved the PAN numbers — the 16-digit card number sequence used to identify all debit cards. Tesco Bank inadvertently issued debit cards with sequential PAN numbers. This increased the likelihood that the attackers would find the next PAN number in the sequence. It took 21 hours after the attack began before Tesco Bank’s Fraud Strategy Team was informed about the incident. Only after what the FCA describes as a “series of errors” — including Tesco Bank’s Financial Crime Operations Team sending an email to the wrong address, instead of making a phone call as procedure requires — was the fraud team made aware of the attack. In all that time, nothing had been done to stop the attacks, with fraudulent transactions continuing to siphon money from accounts as the bank received more and more calls from worried customers.